Thought Sparks

Going live with a website is always a fun process. This past weekend we launched a site I’ve been working on for a good bit. As I’ve referenced in a recent post, it was built upon WordPress. The site is onedayacademy.com, a school for homeschoolers in Austin, Texas. Some of the nice features of the site include:

• A dynamic course schedule that pulls data from a .csv file. This allows the content managers to edit in Excel and then upload replacing the current version. This custom application enables very little training for those who do the up-keep, while offering a flexible interface for the end-user.
• A browser-compatible drop-down menu (at least in FireFox and IE the baseline requirement).
• A dynamic side navigation that drills-down one level to the child menus and up one level to the parent page. I find that most plug-ins for WordPress navigation are overly complex for such basic functionality.
• A clean design. Yeah, it’s not the most eloquent layout, but the more classic design I think and hope will serve the audience well.

In the end the site was done on-time and under budget. That is always a nice ending to any project. As is quite often the case, the real "magic" in getting the project done in an efficient manner requires good project management. If you ask me, that’s the real challenge to most projects. What do you think?